Sculpture Installation: Horsing Around the Arrows of Time, Dag Hammarskjold Plaza, New York City

Arrows? Why arrows, was a frequent question asked when people saw my paintings--which was years before I even dreamed of doing sculptures. Indeed these arrows were everywhere. And why? The arrows mean energy moving, I said. You have to say something. Moving through what, they said. Through time, I said. I was making it up. Then I found that The Arrow of Time was a term coined in 1927 by Arthur Eddington, a British astronomer. See the Wikipedia. I was disheartened to learn that at least as far as physics is concerned Eddington's arrow, moving only in one direction is a property of entropy alone--hence the future of our planet was all doom and gloom. Reading further I discovered a more hopeful theory by the Belgian Nobel laureate Ilya Progogine, which shows that in a state of non-equilibrium, order emerges. Non-equilibrium brings order out of chaos. Progogine's Arrow of Time moves in both directions. Here atop the steps of The Dag Hammarskjold Plaza where arrows are shooting out in every direction, the purple king, the blue thinker, and green Mother Earth observe the magenta acrobats. The four pieces in Horsing Around The Arrows Of Time were designed as individual pieces, done purely for fun. They came together to fulfill the needs of the site, the acrobats and horsemen were named Horsing Around, maybe they were at a fair, but later with the inclusion of Mother Earth it became evident there was a story. Who are these acrobats, so zany, so energetic? If they have something to do with the environment--and we can guess that they do, since this is a park, then let us hope that these acrobats will find some energy solutions--perhaps they are modern alchemists who will turn garbage into gasoline. But why are the horsemen throwing up their hands--and where are their legs? Notice that Mother Earth is down on one knee. Is she begging or praying?